When the winter rainscome pourin' downOn that new home of mine,Will you think of meand wonder if I'm fine?Will your restless heartcome back to mineOn a journey thru the past.Will I still be in your eyesand on your mind?

Now I'm going back to CanadaOn a journey thru the pastAnd I won't be backtill February comesI will stay with youif you'll stay with me,Said the fiddler to the drum,And we'll keep good timeon a journey thru the past.

When the winter rainscome pourin' downOn that new home of mine,Will I still be in your eyesand on your mind?Will I still be in your eyesand on your mind?

We used to talk about the separation of church and state more frantically, but one thing that continues to brazenly surround and envelop those two concepts is our luminous, better-not-question-it economic system.

Never mind holy capitalism itself, one single cell phone brand holds more sway than most religions — and we’re all too wearily familiar with a certain businessman’s advertorial takeover of the most powerful nation on earth.

Even before Wednesday night’s Arcade Fire show began, the 9,000-strong crowd was presented on the thin, LED ribbon screen inside the downtown arena a number of enigmatic brand logos — a cursive capital L, a tongue with an asterisk on it, a slick Möbius strip — as a faceless cowboy huckstered us into the show on screen. Clearly, we were being asked to think about our world (while simultaneously poked by said cowboy to buy T-shirts).

Arcade Fire’s current tour is called Infinite Content, its accompanying album Everything Now, and together they continued in a cheerful and singalong way the band’s subtly dystopian worldview in a show where the visuals and satirical concepts were as strong as the music itself, down to an ad for a pointless USB fidget spinner and the band’s branded baseball team activewear.

Nine strong, Arcade Fire is fronted by singers Win Butler and his wife Régine Chassagne, who walking through the crowd with the group like contenders took turns shining under a stage placed centrally on the floor as a boxing ring, ropes included. Through the dazzling lightshow, every band member shifted positions, Butler particularly needing the squirt bottle as he climbed up on plinths and piano alike, centre stage being a lazy Susan upon which he rotated like a trophy.

A dance party churning around them all night, the Fire opened with the new Everything Now and Signs of Life, dispensing one of their biggies quickly with Rebellion (Lies) — one of five songs extending into the audience cooing along past the music’s end.

Disco and Afrobeats, funk rhythms and flutes, saxophones and sung-through megaphones all fuelled the party. That said, Here Comes the Night Time and Chemisty slowed it down during the often mellow night, the latter making use of a kiss cam on the Borg cube hanging above the band. Butler nodded to a show they played at Red’s in 2005 as if it was their last time here, smiling, “It’s nice to be back, Edmonton,” later inviting anyone lost in the stratospheric upper levels of Rogers to come down and join them on the dance floor.

Chassigne took the lead the first of a few times on the tingly Electric Blue, the band’s Tom Tom Club moment, and another new one, Put Your Money on Me, mixed that deep sci-fi Stranger Things organ everyone loves right now with a telethon counter on screen that perhaps not coincidentally stopped on a dollar value matching the world’s approximate human population.

“Please turn your lights on” the master screen asked us next for the by-far most Instagrammed part of the night, Neon Bible, everything surrounded by a nodding electric starfield. Beautiful.

My Body is a Cage followed, the ring’s former ropes echoed in vertical lights, then horizontal bars between four hanging pillars out from the stage’s corners, visual stimulus almost getting to that casual overwhelming level of any Tokyo night.

Butler asked us to be gentle as they crashed and quickly recovered the never-before-played-live Good God Damn with a reggae vibe, one of many signposts of spiritual yearning from these clever cats.

The gorgeous The Suburbs/Ready to Start mini set was especially tragic right now between its wanting to have a daughter “to show her some beauty before it’s too late” and “businessmen drink my blood” — music for a world that’s already ending, so what else is there to do but dance?

A great mess of noise, Reflector summoned Bowie’s ghost, like you wouldn’t use him if he collaborated with you. Afterlife, the sad rocker, activated everyone (William Butler, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbusy, Jeremy Gara, Sarah Neufeld, the energetic Tiwill Duprate and saxman Stuart Bodie) and ended in a subtle blend with New Order’s 1982 maudlin masterpiece, Temptation.

The raucous and awesome Creature Comfort, not far from a screamo Nine Inch Nails song, took us to the encore.

New York openers Phantogram, Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter trading off vocals, were also awesome, especially when they smashed away from dance pop into goth industrial, like their songs Run Run Blood and You Don’t Get Me High Anymore. Look ’em up and mute the 30-second YouTube ads!

Walking through the crowd to the stage for the encore, 37-year-old Butler sang subtitled karaoke for We Don’t Deserve Love, sometimes looking like a sad egg in that hat, as Chassagne full-on collapsed on stage with her face buried in her hands. But she was up and smiling again for the slow Everything Now reprise, and that whoa oh oh oh thing that’s so infected hot folk was in force for Wake Up, which continued to play through the annoying bottleneck escape from the building, into the crystalline snow falling outside and an uncertain future apart from each other after such an evening of love.

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